One motivation for the project is a significant decline in the number of people considered active contributors to the flagship English-language Wikipedia: it has fallen by 40 percent over the past eight years, to about 30,000. Research indicates that the problem is rooted in Wikipedians’ complex bureaucracy and their often hard-line responses to newcomers’ mistakes, enabled by semi-automated tools that make deleting new changes easy (see “The Decline of Wikipedia”).
Aaron Halfaker, a senior research scientist at Wikimedia Foundation who helped diagnose that problem, is now leading the project trying to fight it, which relies on algorithms with a sense for human fallibility. His ORES system, for “Objective Revision Evaluation Service,” can be trained to score the quality of new changes to Wikipedia and judge whether an edit was made in good faith or not….
ORES can allow editing tools to direct people to review the most damaging changes. The software can also help editors treat rookie or innocent mistakes more appropriately, says Halfaker. “I suspect the aggressive behavior of Wikipedians doing quality control is because they’re making judgments really fast and they’re not encouraged to have a human interaction with the person,” he says. “This enables a tool to say, ‘If you’re going to revert this, maybe you should be careful and send the person who made the edit a message.’”
..Earlier efforts to make Wikipedia more welcoming to newcomers have been stymied by the very community that’s supposed to benefit. Wikipedians rose up in 2013 when Wikimedia made a word-processor-style editing interface the default, forcing the foundation to make it opt-in instead. To this day, the default editor uses a complicated markup language called Wikitext…(More)”
